AGONY ON CAMPUS: WHAT IS RAPE? - A SPECIAL REPORT.

AGONY ON CAMPUS: WHAT IS RAPE? - A SPECIAL REPORT.; Students Trying to Draw Line Between Sex and an Assault

By WILLIAM CELIS 3d

Published: January 2, 1991

Among college students around the country, a very public soul-searching unthinkable a generation ago is occurring. Men and women are asking themselves and each other: When is sex considered sex, and when is sex considered rape?

"It's such a fuzzy topic," said Pamela Brady, a senior at Lehigh University. One of her classmates, Darrin Halsey, added, "It's easy to look at sex and second-guess."

The uncertain answers are a sign of the times on the nation's campuses, where sexual discussion has taken on increasingly troubled tones as more women say they have been raped, not by strangers, but by men they knew well or casually. The growing prominence of the phenomenon, acquaintance rape or date rape, raises as many questions about subtleties in male-female relationships as it does about criminality on campus.

Sexual activity that goes too far and becomes abhorrent to the woman is not new among college students, nor are the forces behind it. But calling it date rape is, and the term itself may have given it a new identity, defining sex between dates or acquaintances without the woman's consent as a form of male assault rather than a form of female error.

Indeed, the national news media's first mention of rape between acquaintances or dates is most often attributed to the 1975 book "Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape," by Susan Brownmiller. "Fifteen years ago, women who were raped by young men didn't even understand this was an actionable offense," she said in a recent interview. Instead, Ms. Brownmiller said, the woman "felt she had done something wrong."

Jennifer Volchko, the associate dean of student life at Lehigh University who works with a student group that educates others about acquaintance rape, said giving the problem a name had increased understanding and awareness of it. Such awareness has also been accelerated by the fact that the current generation of college women has matured under the influence of the feminist movement, and as a result is more willing than earlier generations to come forward to protest what is seen as men overstepping their bounds.

This fall, some women at Brown University, angered about acquaintance rape on their campus, began writing the names of men they said had sexually assaulted women on the walls of restrooms. At San Francisco State University this month, a noisy student forum turned confrontational as women demanded that administrators do more to address the problem of date rape. And when a student at the University of Rhode Island said she was raped in a fraternity house in October, women staged a candlelight walk across campus to bring attention to the problem. Men Profess Confusion

As women's protests increase, many men profess confusion. They say women with whom they have had sex did not say "no" and did not physically resist, yet later complained of date rape. Other, angrier men contend that in some cases women have encouraged their advances. Women call that an after-the-fact excuse; sexual intercourse, they argue, should proceed from clear mutual consent.

The most widely cited study to date on the issue was conducted in 1984 and 1985 by Mary P. Koss, then at Kent State University and now a professor of psychiatry at the University of Arizona, and three associates, with financing from the National Institute of Mental Health. It found that 207 women, or almost 7 percent of the sample of 3,187 polled on 32 campuses, said they had experienced sexual assault in the previous 12 months. The poll defined assault as intercourse by physical force, intercourse as a result of intentionally getting the woman intoxicated, or forcible oral or anal penetration.

Samples of such size and design typically have a margin of samping error of one or two percentage points.

But university administrators, counselors and students say they believe that acquaintance rape occurs far more often than is reported or than studies show. 'A Perception Issue'

One of the biggest reasons for date rape is the high level of consumption of alcohol on campus, they say, but other factors are also involved. The introduction of dormitories shared by both sexes has fueled the problem, as has the way that the social life on some campuses has been disproportionately defined by fraternities and athletics.

Above all, assumptions about the roles of men and women seem to be shifting, with a resulting confusion on both sides about what is and is not acceptable behavior.

"It is clearly a perception issue," said Kim Gandy, counsel for the National Organization for Women.

She and others who have studied acquaintance rape say the act is substantially underreported. Many women are still reluctant to report such assaults because one or both of the partners was drunk at the time or because women believe that they must have unwittingly encouraged men.

Moreover, men and women in college are often reluctant to admit mistakes because, for freshmen in particular, they are testing the limits of their freedom for the first time without parental reins, university counselors said.